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snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy takes an in-depth look at VMware Workstation 7, VirtualBox 3.1, and Parallels Desktop 4, three technologies at the heart of 'the biggest shake-up for desktop virtualization in years.' The shake-up, which sees Microsoft's once promising Virtual PC off in the Windows 7 XP Mode weeds, has put VirtualBox — among the best free open source software available for Windows — out front as a general-purpose VM, filling the void left by VMware's move to make Workstation more appealing to developers and admins. Meanwhile, Parallels finally offers a Desktop for Windows on par with its Mac product, as well as Workstation 4 Extreme, which delivers near native performance for graphics, disk, and network I/O. 'There's some genuine innovation going on, especially in the areas of hardware support and application compatibility,' Kennedy writes. 'All support 32- and 64-bit Windows and Linux hosts and guests, and all have added compelling new VM management capabilities, ranging from automated snapshots to live VM migration.'"

Actually now that you raise that point, it's not as bizarre as it sounds. I was getting ready to ridicule it but giving Linux the ability to play Wine unsupported games and Windows 7 the ability to play WinXP-dependant games with decent performance may be one of the main consumer drivers of virtual machines. Though I'm not holding my breath on it being widespread just yet.

Hey! I spent many happy years of my life playing pre-source CS. It's still better than a LOT of the crap that passes for online games these days. Before about 1.5 I didn't even have a decent internet connection, I spent a lot of time making my own bots to play against xD

It does not do accelerated 3d. That is clearly one of the main features for 'normal' users trying to play games in their VM.

The only games I play on a VM are the ones too old to work on XP, designed for DOS and pre 95 windows.

And believe me, they do not need accelerated 3d.

Anyone who is able to launch a VM of whatever OS they want to play whatever game they want is probably better off just installing it on a seperate partition, because there's no sense in playing a game while running 2 operating systems at once.

Because with a dual-boot system, you have to reboot to switch between games and work. With a virtualised second OS, you just kill off (or suspend) the VM when you want to do some work again. Also, if you've suspended the VM, you can carry on right where you left off, no save-games necessary (which more often than not leave you at some arbitrary place in the level, rather than where you were when you saved).

If partitions can offer the same kind of flexibility as VMs then sure.

With some VM systems, it is possible to have forks off a central VM. i could have MAIN, MAIN + GAME1, MAIN + GAME2.... If some super hard core LAN gamer wanted to do that they could end up with a dozens partitions... or one VM with several snapshots.

Are there partitioning systems, or tricks with partitioning that might do something like that?

Build the core OS with everything you'll want to play *any* game (browser, audio and video drivers). Then have VM snapshot of that + the game you're installing. So in my case, i'd have MAIN + PlanetSide. It would be like having a separate, pristine system for each game. No iTunes or Google Services running in the background. Just a clean system running that one game.

The more things change... the more they stay the same. It sounds like going back to the old philosophy of having to have a separate boot disk for each game. I understand what you're saying though. The benefit of having a clean system with the bare minimum of services + the game is a good deal.

I personally use virtual box to help some clients of mine in their OSX transitions. I'm not a big fan of OSX and I still run Windows on my personal computers, but I'm getting tired of cleaning up after other people

The only games I play on a VM are the ones too old to work on XP, designed for DOS and pre 95 windows.

because there's no sense in playing a game while running 2 operating systems at once

If the games you are playing in a VM are DOS / W95, the whole VM should take minimal CPU, memory, and graphics resources. On a modern multi-core multi-ghz PC with 2-4 gigs of RAM, I'd say that makes plenty of sense. One a quad-core x86, you should be able to run 10 old games in parallel W95 vms and still run each better than on an old sub-333mhz pentium the game was originally intended for.

I just wanted to say that I have some experience with Virtualbox 3.1 and I disagree with the "ease-of-use" assessment of 7/10. I've played around with VMWare 7, Virtualbox, and VirtualPC, and Virtualbox is about as easy as a virtualization program can get. It has a simple GUI interface to setup your VM, provides sane settings by default, and allows lots of optimizations (like increasing # of cores used and 3D accel) easily.

I'm currently running Ubuntu 9.10 x86 in Windows 7 Professional x64, sharing 4 CPUs and allocating 512 MB of RAM to the VM. The VM runs very well and starts up incredibly fast. I'm very happy with it. It was also dead easy to install. Virtualbox also has a huge array of support for OS's - pretty much every Linux flavor, all Windows verisons from DOS/Win 3.x to Win 7/2008 R2, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, BeOS, Haiku etc. See http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Guest_OSes [virtualbox.org] for a full list.

In addition, it has VT-x and AMD-V support, but it isn't required. But, the best part is that it is open source (there is a closed version with a few more features) and FREE.

I didn't find Vmware as easy to use (rated 9/10). It was fine, just not easier than Virtualbox.

VMWare Server 1.x was great. For 2.x, they decided to ditch the native client in favour of an awful web interface that barely worked. That's one of the reasons why you don't hear many people singing its praises any more. It went from being useful to being absolutely horrible to use. VirtualBox is also free to use, it understands VMWare images, and it doesn't have that awful web interface.

No it isn't. Its the same dog-awful crap that they use in the Virtual Infrastructure Client and Virtual Center used with the ESX deployments. Sloooow, cumbersome, crashing, useless crap. Orders of magnitude more pain than the old 1.x interface. One of the main reasons (in addition to exorbitant costs, total mess with license management, constant wholesale re-branding of every component with every major release - Virtual "Sphere" anyone? - and the Virtual Center Linux non-support, etc, etc) why we are in the

If xenserver had better resource management then I think vmware would be on its way out of my lab.

Actually, take a look at the built-in linux KVM which is getting seriously competitive in some environments. If combined with an HA-NAS solution and some custom scripts it can get quite useful in large scale deployments (as long as you do not expect pretty GUI management tools). The only serious technical weakness versus VmWare ESX is at this point lack of VMotion (which is a bit of a solution looking for a pr

Not at all. I've used (or tried to use) several versions after it became "stable". The web interface was still complete garbage. I'm not sure what the point of the stupid web interface is anyway when you still need a native application (in the form of a browser plugin) to interact with the console.

Last time I tried VMware Server (latest version), it was mostly web-based as opposed to its previous version which was more "together." It was also kind of a hog. Excellent for servers, terrible for workstations.

I had the same experience, but then I found out I can use the VMWare Infrastructure Client to connect to the machine running VMWare Server 2.0 (https://hostname:8333). Now it connects/manages/works nicely. It would be best if it was the VMWare-supported way of doing things, considering their terrible Web UI. My only problem with it is that you can't configure machines with the Infrastructure Client (which only supports v4 hardware) after you've modified them with the web client (which supports v7).

I think the point behind that was to make it closer to their Infrastructure Client, which is a LOT more expensive. It's great for servers that are dedicated to cheap virtualization, but is terrible for workstations. That's not a big deal either, considering that it's really a server product and wasn't 'technically' meant to be used on the workstation, anyway.

but crawled onto second place for being free. I think cost should be kept out of reviews, instead tell what you think of the product - as it is - then the reader can decide for himself if the price is worth the extras.

Whether it meets some arbitrary definition of "freedom" shouldn't affect its score. If "freedom" is a desirable feature for certain users, they can certainly weigh that appropriately themselves.

VirtualBox is free as in Open Source. Which is very important to some folks, and unimportant to others. But that doesn't mean whether a product is Open Source or not shouldn't factor into these reviews...

Some of these products offer better speed, or better administration, or better 3D support... All of which will matter to some people, but not everyone. Are we going to toss out all of those as well?

If we toss out every single difference between products that some random person out there may not care abo

When I wrote free I referred to the price, not that it is open source. I suspect most folks look at the price separately regardless of what a product scores, which is why I don't think the price should be baked into the score of a product.

I agree. I used Parallels software up until recently, and it was the lack of free as in freedom that was causing my grief.

I just don't like the fact that Parallels comes pretty close to using a subscription model. If you don't upgrade to the newest version, then you don't get any future bug fixes. Why can't I keep getting support for software I already paid for and is less than a year old? I upgraded 3 times since buying Parallels Desktop for Mac 1.0, and 3 seems to be my limit especially when it works out

With support for up to 32 virtual CPUs per VM, VirtualBox is now the class leader in terms of raw virtualization muscle. The introduction of branched snapshots is a major usability upgrade from version 3.0, while the new Teleportation feature (live VM migration) means that VirtualBox is now poised to challenge VMware and Microsoft in the datacenter.

I agree and that was my point. IF cost is an issue it should be included. If your just looking for the best product it shouldnt even be mentioned. We use the free VMware server in our patch test environment as its a free and it performs pretty well. I have some complaints about the UI as the guy does above but its functional 95% of the time with limited headache. Production side we use ESX but the costs of that just didnt make sense for a test environment for workstation patches.

Not right. I've gotten ESXi 4 to run on every whitebox system I have tried it on. And you use the Virtual Infrastructure client to connect to it (which comes with it) but you do not need to use VirtualCenter, or vCenter as it is now called.

I havent tried it since 3. I will be looking at it when I build a new server here in a couple weeks. Thanks

ESX (either the "i" variant or not) version 3 was fairly pickly about hardware. Much hardware that was directly supported by the VM kernel still would not be recognized without some tweaks.

With version 4, the philosophy seems to have changed so that although they still have a semi-limited set of drivers, almost all hardware supported by those drivers is automatically recognized. By also adding support for plain SATA drives on SATA controllers, the base of possible hardware has increased a lot.

The arbitrary "placing" of products is one of the more annoying features of these reviews. The better ones just outline the competitive differences and deficiencies of the products and let a knowledgeable user determine which fits their needs (value for money potentially being one of those needs), and then follow it up with corresponding information on how to determine which fits their needs for those less knowledgeable.

The arbitrary "placing" of products is one of the more annoying features of these reviews.

Its often the case that one product is head and shoulders above the others. There's no reason that shouldn't be recognized, even if one of the lesser products has a niche it excels in.

I agree the rankings are often arbitrary, and based on author biases, and so on, but they are often relevant. When I'm looking at 10 consumer laser printers... having them identify clearly which they felt were the best gives me a starting

That is one way to look at it.I have used Virtual Box and I find that it getting bumped down for ease of use is a bit silly. It isn't hard to use at all. It maybe slightly more difficult to install but once installed it is trivial to use.So lets drop ease of use and "value" from the matrix.If you do that they tie at 8.6 for the top spot.Before you dismiss Virtual Box out of hand take a good look at the matrix.The only area outside of ease of use that VirtualBox got less than a 9 on was VM management where it got an 8.Also take a look at the weights of each column. Ease of use is 25% while cost is only 10%.I think the cost and the Ease of use are both interesting metrics. With a cost of Free I can see no reason not to try VirtualBox first. If you find the ease of use and VM management good enough for your task then you have a huge win. The other may have demo systems you can try for a limited amount of time but they will still cost you money so VirtualBox really should be the first system on anybody's list to try.

I have used Virtual Box and I find that it getting bumped down for ease of use is a bit silly. It isn't hard to use at all. It maybe slightly more difficult to install but once installed it is trivial to use.

I have to agree with this as well. If someone has sense enough to make use of virtual machines then they should have sense enough to glom to the VBox or VMWare interfaces and controls about equally well in my opinion. The only thing I can honestly say is easier for me on VMWare is copying a virtual machine from one computer to another and then just starting it up. On VMWare, you just copy the machine's directory from/home/user/vmware to wherever you want on your other computer then click on the virtualm

No, a review is a comparison by one person of several choices...The price is just another comparison point, how important that point is to the review is up to him.

Personally i consider free (as in freedom) a positive point, as is availability of source code..

As to free (as in monetary price), that is also a beneficial point.. In order for me to consider using something i have to pay for it needs to not only be superior to the free option, but sufficiently superior to justify its price tag, a minor improveme

VirtualBox is also great for network labs as you can bind physical NICs to seperate virtual machines. You can't do that with any others until you start getting into ESX territory afaik.

As an example you can run Checkpoint or Olive on it and link it in with Dynamips, get an entire enterprise network running on your desktop. Maybe not everyones idea of fun but a comparable hardware lab setup would run to many thousands of pounds.

I'd second your comments about the Atom too, it runs XP blazingly fast.

This has been a feature of every VMware desktop release I've used, since before VirtualBox was around

It's not as obvious how to do it on VMware Workstation, though.

You need to change one of the "virtual networks" to bridge to a specific adapter. In addition, on a Windows host you should disable all protocols but the "VMware Bridge protocol" from binding to that adapter. Then, you set the VM to use that virtual network.

I have my vCenter server running this way, because version 2.5 could run on a domain controller, and version 4 cannot. An install of workstation later, and vCenter is running with its own

I use Virtual box on a pair of mac intel core duo 2 machines to run windows XP pro I'm very pleased with it. It essentially works perfectly. I don't care that it is only single processor since All I want is basic seemless windows functionality for those few cases where software is windows only.

it works well with USB devices. I use it to program Lego Mindostorms, and for Midi (to USB) keyboard input and some thumb drives.

it will mount any folder on my mac disk either permenantly or temporarily (these show us as X: or Y: or whatever). What's mildly annoying is that this is 2 step process: first you tell the VM to "add the drive" then you have to use a windows "run" command "net use x: " to tell windows about it. the second step seems strange to me, but you only do it one time.

I've had three things I could not figure out.

I never was able to get a windows media player to mount in media player mode so I could use windows DRM protected WMA files on it and manage it from within windows media player 11. Instead it only will mount as a thumb drive.

I was not able to get a virtual CD device to mount an iso image or burn an iso image (as a work around for getting the WMA files in a format I could play).

It will not burn a CD or DVD.

also I never figured out how to add my Samsung C310 printer to it or my HP multifunction printer to it. it does see them, it just never finds the drivers. However I'm pretty certain this is a windows driver problem and nothing to do with the VM.

For smaller scope tasks, there's nothing wrong with Virtual Box, but when you start running 50+ machines, you just need something like ESXi server. I've never used the web interface and don't plan to. We always use the Windows client.

You're comparing apples to oranges -Virtualbox is a type 2 hypervisor like VMware Workstation / Player. How does Vbox scale compared to Workstation?How does XenServer scale compared to ESXi?Those are fair and relevant comparisons.

Linux's KVM module and the "Virtual Machince Manager" (VMM) app that uses it needs to be measured on here. The interface is simple and easy.

It has shiny features too:
- live OS migration.
- Tools like "Test Drive Ubuntu" can use it to give you one-click "Test your bug in a daily build VM".
- FOSS on FOSS (Linux, BSD, etc) no-latency driver requests being passed to the Host OS, meaning only 1 context switch per Virtual-Physical interrupt.
- It's contributers are all still in the business of improving it (unlike all those mentioned except Parallels)
- It's FOSS, has very little code, is the fastest growing
- Its modules can run code for other CPUs (good for the oncoming ARMs).

Hardware virtualization helps for Windows virtualization. Please measure programs that use it (other than with Virtualbox which doesn't cooperate).

I have no doubt that VMWare is a good product but the UI is terrible, and performance can be a bit iffy. On the other hand I've had nothing but a good experience with VirtualBox. Performance is excellent and the UI is nice and friendly too. I'm sure I might think different if I were some admin with a whole bank of these to run and other requirements, but for personal use VirtualBox has been far better than VMWare.

It's too bad that no VM tool seems to support OS X as a guest. I'm sure it must be possible.

When it comes to VM's I use for interactive work like running Win32 desktop apps or gaming, I prefer Parallels Desktop 5 on OS X. It even has WDDM drivers for Winblows. Very slick, integrates well with OS X and has good enough 3D performance to play some games.

When it comes to virtual servers, I use VirtualBox where scalability isn't a HUGE concern. I also use it extensively in the classroom since it's quite free and not hard for students to get ahold of and feel comfortable using it. The 3D performance

I've been using VMware religiously for a few years now to test web pages in Windows-based browsers (I do web-based UI design on Linux and love it), but recently I've been doing more design/visual work and less markup/scripting, so I bought a deep-colour (10 bit) display with a much wider gamut than sRGB and promptly went about setting up the requisite software.

It took very little time for me to discover that VMware has absolutely no colour management capability, which completely kills any chance you have of using Windows-based, colour-managed applications like Photoshop (unless you are intentionally not using a colour-managed workflow).

The color matrix/LUT itself must obviously be created and applied in the host OS (I use Argyll and an X-Rite i1 Display 2 all on Linux, which work great) but it's useless if the Windows application isn't aware of the display profile.

I did a bit of reading and it turned out VirtualBox does support hardware display profiles for Windows guests; the same afternoon I had a Windows XP VirtualBox guest running Photoshop CS3 with full colour management and has since been working great. Strongly recommend to other Linuxy designer-types finding themselves in a similar situation.

On a related note, if ever you do create a calibrated monitor profile using Argyll that you intend to use with Firefox, use a matrix type profile, not a LUT -- Firefox apparently does not support the more accurate LUT profiles at all, but matrix profiles work just fine. I use the LUT for the general display profile but point firefox explicitly to an alternate matrix profile so that photos containing embedded display profiles show up with gamma and especially saturation levels for my display.

Yes, there are actually numerous benefits you are missing, and none of them have anything to do with my "e-peen" as some other anonymous coward commented. The market for 30-and-higher bit display technologies is far from being electronic snake oil, I assure you; every movie you've ever seen in a digital cinema is projected at no less than 12 bits per colour component, for example -- considerably more colour than is supposedly "indistinguishable by the human eye" than my display is capable of reproducing.

If you actually bother to boot up and try VirtualBox you will find it very buggy compared to VMware...

Sorry, I have to disagree. I have many, many instances of VirtualBox running and I love it. I *have* had some issues, but only with some really far out edge cases. I find it to be very easy to use, and reliable. As a sysadmin, VBoxManage is awesome for scripting.

VirtualBox is at least $189 less than any other product. That makes it 189 times "BETTER" than anything else, especially when you start in with the feature comparisons.

VMware Player and VMware Server are available for free. Also, if you are going to judge VirtualBox as being X times better than some other product because of cost, VirtualBox would then be infinitely better than VMware Workstation. But it's clearly not infinitely better. Only the open source edition of VirtualBox is free for everyone; the

VMware has Aero support in Windows VIsta/7, which VirtualBox does not. VMware's Direct3D and OpenGL support is more advanced.

Just thought I'd chime in on this. True VMWare will run aero. But it doesn't run it fast by any means at least in my experience on an E8400 Core2Duo running Ubuntu 9.10 as a host and Win7 guest. And VBox will run compiz in a Linux guest surprising well. Last I checked, VMWare didn't support compositing in a Linux guest. So, depending on what you're doing is what makes one better than the other in this regard.

My latest edge case was running some really, really old and crusty 16bit program in a Windows XP guest and having it bluescreen. I didn't try it in Vmware. Before switching to VirtualBox I used Vmware player on these workstations, but it couldn't keep up performance wise. I use Vmware server (v2) on our two main servers here, each running 6 VM's. I had used Vmware server (v1) before that. I also bought and used a copy of Vmware Workstation when is still cost $300. Sorry, I don't see how Vmware Workstation i

I was under the impression that VMs couldn't be created with Player either, so I built one in Workstation at the office, copied it to a flash drive, took it home where I installed the newest version of Player, and copied the VM to that machine.

But in the process of playing around with VMware Player, I did see an option for creating new virtual machines. Didn't explore any further, but it seems the new version does support not just playing, but building.

If you actually bother to boot up and try VirtualBox you will find it very buggy compared to VMware, to the point of being not very usable. I spent several days trying to get VirtualBox to work for me but there were just too many problems.

No you will not. Recent Virtualbox is very stable, I haven't seen a crash on Vbox version > 3.0.1 I use it in complex networking high peak load setups without issue. Only time I can bring it down is running high load in a nested hypervisor environment.

I've used both for a couple years. If you don't need the ACE and Developer features of VMware, then Virtualbox is a fantastic substitute. Performance is roughly the sameon dual-core AMD 64-bit.From a usability standpoint, it's been ahead of VMware for quite a while.

For example, you can send keystrokes to Virtualbox without trapping the keyboard output - the VBox window only has to have focus. Also, attaching virtual or physical disksor images to VBox has long been simpler, but perhaps VMware has caught up.

False. Both are methods for running the software you want while still retaining the freedom to select an operating system.

It's a compatibility layer, nothing more.

False. It's a compatibility layer that might eliminate the need for you to use full-blown virtualization.

Yes, I am aware of the recursive acronym. I see it (and your comment) as exactly the kind of pendantry that is keeping many people from enjoying open source software. Fortunately I am able to see past it, and despite the name of the product, I am able to realize that Parallels and